Rough first draft for Chapter Eleven – needs further work. Will post in two parts
Modern Anthropology’s Standard Model
March 2014
Contra Stanner et al, my perspective is one that also engages in a form of speculative history – this can be stated fairly simply – that ‘Palaeolithic’ life was largely settled – in the sense that so many problems had been resolved – and that local groups were marked by moieties as part of an open ended application of culture.
Call them horizontal
Then life gets deformed by one group seeking to impose itself ‘on top’
Call that vertical
The process of attempting to impose one group on top gives us much of what we know as ‘history’.
BACKGROUND MODERN ANTHROPOLOGICAL MODEL
Radcliffe-Brown had a 'general type' says Stanner - this was refined to produce a kind of 'standard model' - which locates 'ownership' in a patrilineal descent group.
First Peoples Ways are thus distorted from a meaningful totality to a privileged segment.
Warumungu life seems to be better regarded as being informed by an overriding concern for positioning life (as represented by its male members) in the proper place - as determined by First Peoples priorities and notions of order. This is a dynamic challenge, especially in times of unprecedented change, and requires a high degree of life-skill on the part of senior people.
Contra the views of some modern masters, it is not a simple-minded and virtually mechanical reproduction of ancestral ways of life in which son follows father ad infinitum.
Modern anthropology is part of life which has been subjected to ‘neolithic’ transformations. As far as i can tell, all societies formed by these means have myths about ‘non-neolthic’ alternative life Ways and these myths serve to justify ‘neo-lithic’ options by making mockeries of the alternatives.
Prior to the origin of cultivated plants people may be depicted as living on rotten wood, grubs and even stones in some myths.
This dismissal of mainstream non-neolthic Ways – that is, those Ways which are inappropriately characterised as “Palaeolithic” – runs deep in farming societies.
Many modern thinkers appear to accept the view that prior to ‘the neo-lithic’ life consisted of small bands living a grim hand-to-mouth existence.
Some modern anthropologists, with little in-depth investigation of non-neolthic realities, readily accept this mistaken presumption as something which can be safely taken for granted.
A sort of classical form of modern anthropology in Australia can be traced trough Radcliffe-Brown, Stanner and still lingers in the works of more recent members of “Australianists”.
This classical form involves an approach which seeks to grasp local life in its totality by objective and scientific means of study. It involves an unreflective intelligence looking out at First Peoples lives as objects of study.
There is little, if any, intellectual effort directed to the task of understanding something of its own socially and culturally constructed means of interpreting experience.
Modern anthropologists can be seen as conceptual craftspeople who fashion forms of representation which comply with specifications from European modern master narratives.
These modern master narratives rest on ‘neolithic’ foundations which have transformed Being. While non-neolithic Ways may be characterised by being a part of life, neolithic Ways move towards forms of being apart from life.
The difference between ‘a part’ and ‘apart’ – in relation to life – makes for profound transformations in how people relate to our surroundings.
Modern anthropology is part of an age of humanism which has presumed that a modern European notion of ‘human’ can be applied to life globally, as though an historically and culturally peculiar notion of ‘human’ can be applied universality without serious question as to the degree of fit it has to the lived realities of other peoples.
Without exception, as far as i am aware, leading modern Australian anthropologists are not people-with-country. They are largely working class people who are unable to engage in substantial exchange relationships with First Peoples (such as those between sovereign parties).
Working class people have been subject to an intense ‘adaptive’ process which has separated them from country. New livings were to be found for those who could fashion forms of representation to comply with the dominating master narratives.
One feature of the conceptual apparatus (part of a modern European unconscious-in-culture) is a split between people and country, a split between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.
The encounter with this country’s First Peoples is an encounter with people whose Being has not undergone this deformation. Peoples-and-countries form a unity.
In place of recent forms of European humanism, in which people- as ‘Homo Sapiens’ - are cut out from their generative context, we have a form of Earth-Being.
It is interesting to read, in a 1965 paper by W.E.H. Stanner – in which he attempts to interpret First Peoples Ways using an ecological approach - the following:
“ … Aboriginal society and culture, the end products of non-linear development, were made up of forms and values far removed and transformed from an adaptative plane.” (1965:4)
First Peoples Ways are indeed profoundly complex. Countless generations of life’s lessons from lived experience have been compressed into messages which can be transmitted from one generation to the next as life endlessly reforms. Following up the Dreaming provides a means which overcomes some of the most difficult of life’s existential constraints.
As Stanner himself has taught us some First Peoples state their position as having been here “from the Beginning”.
Modern anthropology would place that Beginning amongst primates in Africa. Using a ‘Stone Age’ terminology, somewhere back there was the Palaeolithic period, during which new forms of tools were acquired to extend the capabilities of our ancestors – fire was domesticated, culture and language emerged. And, along the way, our ancestors moved out of Africa.
While i always seek to respect the Ways of First Peoples, I have to include in their Beginning that long period called the Palaeolithic and reserve judgement on the question of their origins from this country or from elsewhere.
What is important, to my mind, is the ability to look back along European life from First Peoples perspective which unites peoples-and-countries and to gain some degree of insight into the factors which have gone into the modern master narrative/unconscious-in-culture as this relates to how conceptual craftspeople have fashioned forms of representation of First Peoples.
My assessment is that this fashioning has been a process which recapitulates modern forms of an unconscious-in-culture rather than one which crafts models which best comply with what is known about First Peoples Ways.
This leads to a sort of standard model of First Peoples Ways, which marginalises those known features which do not neatly fit with the presumptions represented by a standard model.
In the 1965 paper Stanner writes:
“ … the evidence seems to me pretty conclusive: everywhere, on present information, some form of patrilineal descent group had an intimate and, subject to special need, convention or rule, exclusive relationship with an identified and demarcated estate.” (1965:14)
and
“I do not think there can be serious question of four things. (1) Some form of exogamous patrilineal descent group was ubiquitous. (2) It had intrinsic connection, not mere association, with a territory. (3) There was a marked tendency towards, though no iron rule requiring, patrilocality and virilocality. (4) The group thus formed was basic to both territorial and social organization, however concealed by other structural groups (e.g. phratries, moieties, sections, etc.) or by dynamic emphases. (1965:16)
Where i differ from Stanner et al on these issues is that they attempt to locate the foundations of First Peoples Ways in some form of patrilineal decent group while i regard what is inscribed on First Peoples Being as the outcome of a vast totalising context.
Rather than being built up from patrilineal descent groups, First Peoples identities – as peoples-with-countries – is bestowed upon them by a much greater process than that of their relationship with their father.
This inscription process takes place locally but that locality does not stand alone as a self-sufficient entity. The form of the locality is a result of its relationships within a vast configuration.
Modern anthropology, which has a narrow focus on First Peoples lives in keeping with its own idea of a scientific and objective approach, has not been able to fashion forms of representation of this much larger configuration or life formation.
Such an approach would require looking at life in terms of flows of messages, including those of acts of exchange, both synchronically and (to the extent it is possible) diachronically. These messages are not only framed in terms of people to people but also between people and their generative context.
The representations of First Peoples lives modern anthropologists fashion restate (in one form or another) aspects of their own Being.
What was deemed to be significant was converted from relata to data.
In his 1965 paper Stanner mentions how, in seeking to question the validity of Radcliffe-Brown’s concept of the ‘horde’:
“I set up the social forms of tribes like the Warramunga … as ‘typical’, and treated Radcliffe-Brown’s conception, not as a general type, which he had intended it to be, but as a stereotype.” (1965:7)
But the social form of Warumungu Stanner has constructed, which also privileged patrilineal descent groups, was not that which can be reconstructed from Spencer and Gillen’s earlier fieldwork.
From a perspective which recognises both the role of the Mother’s Brother (a la Levi-Strauss) and the place of complementary opposition the pride of place for a patrilineal descent group is replaced with a much larger configuration of relatives, all of whom are regarded as being recognised as ‘necessary’ for a full life by Warumungu people themselves.
Stanner’s ‘typical’ social forms were not those of Warumungu as is evident in the ethnographic accounts of Spencer and Gillen which clearly depict the sine qua non role of ‘non-patrilineal’ relations at the core of Warumungu life.
The early 20th century form of modern anthropology in Australia was not that which could have resulted from an unblinkered analysis of the 1901 fieldwork of Spencer and Gillen with Warumungu people.
But the conceptual blinkers were on with the arrival of Radcliffe-Brown’s form of ‘common sense’ in accepting – and greatly underestimating the difficulty – the challenge posed to European understanding by Ways much more sophisticated and complex than those of simple groups of ‘families’ formed by groups of fathers and sons.
Common sense is said to be contrasted with good sense. That is, common sense is itself a wrought product resulting from another far more complex process, not least (as Barthes reminds us) that of the decline and rise of ruling elites in Europe.
The privileging of patrilineal descent groups has its foundations in European notions of life.
As modern anthropology found itself included in the system of Anglo-Australian patronage, as a discipline within a University, this narrow focus provided a dogma which posed no threat to the claims of ownership and sovereignty by the imperial heirs of King George III.
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Depictions of First Peoples as ‘stone-age’ primitives doomed to be swept aside by modern civilisation potentially creates a self-fulling prophecy if left to run its chosen course within a Western monologue.
Fortunately, First Peoples Ways are far more resilient than anything thrown up by the ‘hot’ societies and – no doubt badly impacted – can both survive the initial blow and reform.
My own view, formed by working ‘backwards’ from contemporary First Peoples Ways, is that “Palaeolithic” life was not at all like the small closed groups (bands etc) commonly imagined.
There is very good reason for accepting the view that – during the extremely long period since the emergence of our kind until some 10,000 years (or so) ago life solved all manner of novel problems.
Not least of these was the ability of our species to kill other species, by the extension of our skills by way of weapons and forebrain, with the ability for homicide – that is, to turn those same lethal skills upon each other.
Over the vast available to work such matters out, life was transformed into a highly wrought product at complete variance to that of the model which has small bands living hand-to-mouth etc.
Rather that the ‘nasty, brutal and short’ model, by the ‘late Palaeolithic’ at least, life could be characterised (in comparison with neolithic societies) as open ended and relatively unbounded.
That is, and in great contrast to the romantic view of ‘natives’ being close to nature, life for First Peoples was ‘all culture’ and no ‘society’ (in the sense of society being a bounded ‘billiard’ ball, to use the expression of anthropologist Eric Wolf.)
If contemporary Aranda practices, as described by Strehlow, are any guide to such matters Being was firmly Earthed at specific places. Rather than outer boundaries for groups, this form of anchoring tied people to their places as part of a much larger configuration.
Much energy was invested in ensuring that well-formed people were produced – as a well-formed ‘text’ and able to integrate subjectivity into a living cosmos – the generative parent and ultimate context.
The depth of integration sorted out exceptional people from the ordinary – but all were metaphysically extraordinary and fully alive.
The long garden path to secular materialism, by contrast, progressive numbs and deadens our Being.
So when those of us suffering such spiritual deformity try to imagine life for First Peoples, we do so with ‘blocked’ late-neolithic forms of thinking and (non)relating.
In place of accepting the challenges of learning to relate with First Peoples, we construct stick figures and block models which lend themselves to the preservation of modern Western privileges, maintaining a ‘favourable’ status quo, serve bureaucratic requirements for colonial manipulation and preserve cultural masters illusions of control
Within First Peoples Ways were/are systems of checks and balances which – in stark contrast to modern Western Ways – can be said to state that “Self-regulation is not to be trusted.”
This may have been a hard lesson for life to learn over the long periods we know as ‘the Palaeolithic’, since it has certainly made sure the corrective measures are well and truly inscribed into Being.
While great energies were invested in ensuring that a person was properly formed and able to take their place in life – that place was never one where they were to be regarded (either by themself or by others) as capable of having interests co-extensive with the whole of life.
Universality of the kind found in monotheism was not possible. The forms of abstraction which are required to underwrite universality are inherently unstable. By bestowing a privileged status on one aspect of experience over-values that aspect at the expense of another aspect of experience – which is discarded and sacrificed.
Life is made of such stuff, however that an abstract approach of this kind invariably discards something which is of real importance.
In place of constructing abstract and exclusive towers of Babel, in order to take heaven by storm, First Peoples Ways are marked by a concern to ensure the proper placement of both aspects of experience – so that (to use an already familiar notion) for every yin there is a corresponding and counterbalancing yang.
Securing an enduring place in eternity is more important than those quick burns which may cost us the Earth.
We have a two-sided reality here. Trying to force it into the category of a one-sided logic is never going to work (as is clear with the attempts to map First Peoples Ways with categories such as ‘tribes’ and ‘boundaries’).
We really need to lift our game to a much higher level if we are to be better able to relate across the extensive cultural gap between European and First Peoples Ways.
We need to begin to comprehend exactly how demanding this challenge is – to shed the old 20th century theories regarding institutions and functions – to shed the ideas of privileged position for ‘modern’ ways of life vis-a-vis First Peoples - and to form new views of life existentially.
This carries with it an revision of our own place in life as conceptual craftsworkers. Not so grand as the aspirations of those who sought to make modern anthropology a science of life – that is, who sought to be able to make sense out of the whole of life.
But to make small contributions by way of sharing some insights in the hope of replacing distracting false images by way of opening up spaces for First Peoples voices to be received and – more or less – properly comprehended by others.
First Peoples worlds are divided into two complementary opposite hemispheres – often signified by names such as Eaglehawk and Crow or variations on those themes.
Life is a cosmic balancing act. Maintaining balance between these two hemispheres was and is a collective challenge.
The long process by which this original balanced form of Being was corrupted, to process ruling dynasties, ruling classes and elites gives us much of what is known as ‘history’.
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